Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The new MobileMe Calendar

In an effort to migrate from an old system Apple are forcing everyone using MobileMe to switch calendar services by the 5th May.

After making sure the systems were configured I made the switch. It then wiped out the default calendar on one system and added in a new calendar called "Calendar in MobileMe calendars" into which all the synched data now resides.

Except this is a new calendar and not the default one. So what? Well Microsoft Outlook will only read the To-do list from the default calendar; it will only post meeting appointments that arrive via email to the default calendar and it won't allow you to use this new format from Apple as the default calendar.

The 'fanboys' over at the Apple forums are trying to pull a "blame Microsoft" yeah it's Microsoft's fault that they don't support/allow this format in this particular way, it's their crappy coding that's causing the problem not Apple. Except Apple must have known about this; they were beta testing the new system since last year surely someone mentioned that this didn't play as nicely with Outlook.

Despite that not only did they go ahead with the change from the system that worked, but they forced everyone into making it knowing that it would cause some people problems.

4 comments:

Biosopher said...

Thanks for the warning. I was an early adopter of the new MobileMe calendar. The update broke my syncing exactly as you described and I spent several hours with Apple support explaining it to them.

I finally found that Apple had created a special 'revert back to the old calendar' web page. After reverting, I was fine until now where I'm being forced to update to something that won't work.

I've backed up my Outlook and am about to hit upgrade. I've also installed the latest MM Control Panel from April 25 which 'may' fix this issue. If not, I'll be leasing a $10/month Exchange Server account from RackSpace or switching to Google Sync.

Biosopher said...

FYI...that Mobile Me control panel from April 25 was version 1.6.5. Still waiting for my Outlook backup to complete before I proceed with the forced MM "upgrade"!

Biosopher said...

Nope...didn't work. I'll be switching to Google Sync...or Rackspace's hosted Exchange Server. WIll try the free Google option first. I

FlipC said...

The latest version is now 1.6.6 to fix some issues with syncing.

However as the new format has Outlook subscribing to the calendars rather than using the existing default ones I hold out no hope that this will fix anything to do with this and the fanboys will still continue to blame Microsoft for not allowing the format they want to use. [sigh]